


Sex and Cedarwood

by toujours_nigel



Series: Sex and Cedarwood [1]
Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 05:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>slight AU, Hephaistion walking in on Alexander/Bagoas in Zadrakarta</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sex and Cedarwood

Outside Alexander’s chambers the pages are playing with Peritas. At nearly ten years old, he has lost his puppyish eagerness, and looks resigned and not a little irritated. The boys are not a dab hand at any task or living creature, man or dog, and have not tried to make friends with Peritas, who grows attached to his intimates and is loath to see them leave. At the sight of Hephaistion, he shrugs off their hands and walks dignifiedly up to push his nose into the crook of an elbow. He is the creature’s oldest friend, preceding even Alexander: in Illyria it had taken days of coaxing before he would show even the most desultory interest in the pup; it had been a great relief to Hephaistion when he’d taken to playing with the dog, a sign of hope when he’d named it. Now, of course, Peritas is prized near as high as Oxhead himself, and the pups given as proof of high favour. If there’s a new litter it will answer well, he’ll have to ask the kennel-master, or even Alexander is sure to know. He pushes the door open with the query on his opened lips.  
  
In his youth, when he had heard the story with fresh ears, he had imagined Zeus a well-fleshed man of about forty, dark-haired and black-bearded, pulling a pink young Ganymede roughly onto his lap amid drunken jeers from his companions; he cannot remember what he thought of it as a child, or whether his tutor had thought it unfit for younger minds. Never like this, the young king bending the boy back to kiss his mouth, ivory twining with gold in the cool darkness. There is a smell of cedarwood in the close air, as fragrant as incense. He stands in still shock for a long moment while the heavy door slips from his nerveless hand and closes ponderously; dimly he hears Peritas barking.  
  
The tableau breaks before he has managed to avert his eyes, and his first thought is of shame and the second of quick relief that he has not turned back to wrench the door open and go out into the corridor. The walls are thick, at Zadrakarta, but to leave the royal chambers again so suddenly would be as good as a shout of discovery, and ill payment to Alexander’s open joy at finding Bagoas. There are listening ears enough which would rejoice at reports of a difference between him and Alexander, and those who wish him ill in their deepest hearts would yet show great sorrow for him should it provide a new manner of expressing discontent with Alexander’s show of mercy towards the Persians. With the last crop of pages, who had been scant years younger than them, he could have made of it an easy joke and waited out among them the boy’s departure at a decent interval; the new ones are unbroken to service, even now, and too full of the stories they have heard of Alexander in Macedon and in camp. It is only skin, after all. He has been in Ptolemy’s rooms at all hours of night and day, and Thais has only thrown a fold of furs over her head and slept on while they have planned battle, or has emerged shining from her bath and sat to share a meal or strategy with them, as easy as one’s own sister, and far freer with her friendships. But it is easier when desire is absent.  
  
He pulls a letter from within his cloak, shows it to Alexander with a flourish. “To the Great King Alexander,” he says, “greetings, from Sisygambis the Queen. Shall I leave it here?” There is a table within hands reach with a book lazily unfurled on it; Eros is a strong god who catches one unawares. A Persian coat lies tangled beneath it. “Or would you prefer it read?” There is no place here for an injured lover, but between true friends there are no secrets.  
  
“Did you read it? We shall never hear the end of it, if you have.”  
  
He laughs. “I’d have more sense than to do it before your men, were I to behave in such a traitorous manner. Besides, I haven’t done that since Illyria, and you know as well as I that if I hadn’t we’d have died.”  
  
There is a gasp, and a quiet sound as of someone climbing out of bed all unprepared. Alexander, who has not moved, says into the breathing silence, “What did the messenger tell you?”  
  
“Only that the princesses’ tutor informed him that they are clamouring for exercise, and that to be shut away in a palace is not the best of things for maidens of such high spirit.”  
  
“Did you tell him to not be so over-familiar?” He can see in the shadowed spaces between his lashes, shapely legs bending at the knee to gather up clothing, and again to pull on trousers. For a courtesan, the boy is shy.  
  
“Yes, Alexander. But the tutor is his uncle, and he said he’d only gone to pay respects while waiting for a reply, like a good nephew should.”  
  
“ _’Tion_.”  
  
“I know. But you did want them to learn Greek, and I suppose we were told falsehoods about how closely Persians confine their women.” He does not look up to inquire the truth from the Persian rapidly lacing his shoes, but down more studiedly at the jacket near his feet: one of the buttons has been wrenched nearly completely off. He wills the boy to say something. “And they are quite young, in any case.”  
  
“Barely more than children. I do not wish to imprison them or give them any cause for complaint, but I cannot mount them and set them hunting in the hills. Short of that they may do as they choose, of course.”  
  
“I was wondering whether Peritas had pupped; Persians look well upon dogs, I am told, and it would be a kind gift to make to children.” He waits a beat, and adds in Macedonian, “The rest of his clothing is at my feet, Alexander. What would you have me do?”  
  
Alexander says, in Greek the boy is sure to understand, “Come show me the letter. She must want something other than permission for her grandchildren to make free of the grounds.”  
  
To look upon Alexander is always joyous, and he draws the eye in sweat-soaked illness as surely as in his scarlet plumage in the heat of battle; tumbled and warm from bed he’s incandescent. Their fingers brush past each other in exchanging possession of the letter, and the casual touch sets light to desire coiling low and hungry in his belly, around his spine: it is as though he is the boy in Pella again, thirteen years old and thirteen years gone, for whom every touch struck flame off tinder. He pulls away swiftly, and stands with his hands crossed, one wrist gripped in the other behind his back, presenting a blank facade to Alexander’s questioning look.  
  
Alexander unfurls the parchment, and laughs a little. “She calls me her son.” The tone is plaintive, but his eyes are still shining.  
  
Hephaistion says, as a good friend should, “You have a talent for finding mothers. They are drawn to the filthy five-year-old in you.”  
  
“I have heard Darius knew, after I’d found her on the field of battle. He knew or he guessed at it. A strange knowledge.” No reason to ask how he knows when the boy is trying to edge closer to his abandoned clothing without drawing attention to himself. Does he not realise how entirely futile the endeavour is, when he is in a room with Alexander, whose eyes follow him?  
  
“It must be painful to know that the ones you love have found a better object for their affections.”  
  
Alexander smiles at that, but only distantly, half his mind wandering to the Persian court where Darius found his mother no longer thought him her son. “I have heard he was a good man.”  
  
He has heard no such bit of calumny: the Great King of Persia is beyond human judgment, though he hopes devoutly that the boy has told Alexander no such thing yet. He says, “You outshine him like a sun any star, Alexander. He must have known it already when he ran from you in battle and left you his life.” When he was young, before he knew what a King was, he had seen Philip wink at his father across the table and charm his sisters with stories of Thebes and adventures till they had transformed from shy young maidens to little girls clamouring for stories. In a different world Philip might have commanded his loyalty as he had his father’s. “The lovers of bright things turn inevitably to the brilliant, my love. How could anyone not love you?” He turns to Bagoas on the last word, intending a smile. He had given the boy no thought till he wound up in Alexander’s bed, and has given him very little since, but something needs to be done about his wariness.  
  
That the boy is beautiful any man may know who has seen him, but his modesty would do any well-born maiden proud. Hephaistion has only seen his lovely face before this, and his hands with their narrow palms and long fingers: the naked vulnerability of his unclothed torso is a revelation of narrow shoulders and bird-like bones. He looks as though a man could put hands on him and snap him cleanly in half, and Darius was a man near seven foot tall. He does not look up to meet the eyes his body betrays he is aware of, in the tense skin about his collarbones and the rigidity of his spine: his hands wound in the sash of his trousers are twisting the cloth out of shape. He does not like being looked at, an admirable trait in a well-bred child, but strange in one whose life revolves around the pleasures of the bed. He buttons his jacket and flicks it straight with the sullen air of one of his sister’s sons being told to behave well around guests they barely know, and he is, truly, closer in age to Xanthos than to Thais. It is a sobering thought, and keeps his eyes on the ground while Bagoas leaves the room with less grace than he has come to expect: that, too, starts a strange ache in him.  
  
He speaks before Alexander can, the merest pleasantry, accorded from one friend to another. “That boy of yours is as Eros poured into flesh.” It is no more than truth, and the doubled absence of his skin makes it easy to remember as an object of desire: the ivory perfection of it, the slight frame of the boy’s body, the graceful curve of the bones beneath the fine skin, his liquid eyes and the becoming look of surprise in the tilt of his mouth as though he cannot believe that he is the lover of Kings. “He is beautiful as a god.”  
  
Alexander says, low and hurt, the actor’s flippant mask set aside, “I do not mean it to hurt you.”  
  
“It is only a matter of announcing myself, my love. It’s easily done. Does he please you?”  
  
“Well enough.”  
  
“Then what of it? Alexander, shall I leave? You could call him back, I had nothing to tell of any import.”  
  
“Don’t be absurd. Sit down, will you. Besides I never know whether he knows he can refuse.” He tilts his head in the immortalised fashion, frowning. “Perhaps he doesn’t feel he can, one cannot tell.”  
  
“Would you ask one of your soldiers in battle whether he is willing to take a spear for you? And would he refuse if you asked? Perhaps it is like that for him.” It does nothing to ease the thunderclouds from Alexander’s brow. “It is like that for me, but you know that already. And that boy of yours: I would not like to meet him on a battle-field, if he thought he had the strength in him to kill me. I do not mean that he will knife me in the dark in the back. But you must not think him a woman, my love.”  
  
“The only Persians I meet who might have been formidable in war are the ones who have never blooded a sword. A strange people. Sit _down_ , ’Tion.”  
  
He eschews the distant chairs in favour of the bed. Trapped under the covers is a heavy smell of bodies crushed close; with Alexander at his shoulder he might almost forget the boy. “Would you rather have Sisygambis dead? She would be, had she met you in battle. Or you would be, and that I cannot bear to think. And that boy of yours would have bled out on some battlefield and his face would have been ravaged by vultures. What the gods accomplish they do for a reason.” If he’d been a woman, he thinks suddenly, he would never have met Alexander. A terrible thought. “Call him back, my dear, I’ve to go.”  
  
Alexander grips him by the hand and tumbles him into bed in answer.


End file.
